“For sure. Judgment—as much as youths like ourselves might aspire to it—is an old man’s game. The young sword lashes out mindlessly; the rules of a sword master might tell the apprentice how to wield the sword, but only experience will offer instruction on when and where to cut. Suppose you found a truth under some rock. No one else has it. Should you speak or remain silent? Only judgment can say. Should you offer some pieces of wisdom and withhold others? A matter for judgment. Can your truth be taken and used against you? Judgment again. Under pressure you may be tempted to lie. A lie about your found-treasure will have consequences. Is this a good lie or a bad lie? Judgment is never easy. If you always have to blab everything—on principle—it’s a trap. Likewise you’re in a trap if your rule book always tells you to keep a secret.”
“Cut the guff-guff. I want to go out and do something, not listen to your boring lectures. Are we there yet?” Eron pointed through the opaque window.
“When you do something”—the voice was acerbic—“it helps to know how to be effective.”
“As a psychohistorian I’ll be effective.”
A smile. “But will you still have the judgment of a twelve-year-old?”
“That’s a trick question,” said Eron warily. He looked at the blind canopy of their robocar and the photo of the child stuck in the instrument panel. He cocked his ears and listened to his semicircular canals, not having his orientation distorted fam to advise him. “We’ve started to bank in circles. I can tell. I don’t need my fam for that.”
“We’ve arrived but we won’t land until I say so.”
“I’m not calm yet?”
“Almost. Let me run this by you. When a rule fails, Eron, all you’ve got left is judgment Nothing will kill you faster than the combination of a failed rule and a bad judgment call. Rules are good, but no rule is complete enough to apply to all situations. That includes rules about secrecy.” He looked at the small physiodetector’s screen. “How are you feeling?”
Eron checked his emotions. “Fine. I just made a twelve-year-old’s judgment. You’re okay for a monster. I’m sorry I went after Nemia.”
“So you have a rule that tells you when to be sorry, eh?” his tutor commented wryly.
“Am I calm yet?”
Another glance at the screen. “You’re getting there.”
“Can we go down?”
“Just one more thing. We’ve been talking a lot about secrets. You seem to have lifted a lot off your chest. That’s good. It’s what I needed before we could go ahead.” He set the controls for descent. “But I want to leave you with a relevant conundrum to take away with you to Asinia Pedagogic. A riddle to ponder in those ancient halls. It is about secrets and judgment.”
“You can never resist one last nail to hold your lecture together, can you? You should try abstinence sometime. You might qualify as a human being.”
“While you are disqualifying yourself as a human being by becoming a psychohistorian?”
Eron punched him affectionately. “Shoot with the lecture. I’ll give you one shot before we touch down. I can dodge one shot.”
“Psychohistorians make a vow for the good of humanity. They vow to keep secret the methods of their prescience on theory that if their methods were known to all, their predictions would be invalidated and chaos would ensue, right?”
“Right.”
“For instance—if a criminal knows that the police will be at the scene of the crime, he commits his crime elsewhere— and the police knowing that he knows... it gets very complicated.” Murek had turned to remove the helmet and rings from Eron. He was looking his student in the eye. “There are unfortunate side consequences of this ‘noble’ vow of secrecy; it ensures that the society of psychohistorians remains an elite, one as arbitrary as the old Imperial Court We lesser galactic beings have to depend upon the Pscholars’ benevolence—while not being able to ensure it. But—and this is a big but—before you become a psychohistorian, before you know enough to make a sound judgment, you’ll be asked to take their vow of secrecy—and your vow will be enforced.”
“And you want me to leave my mind open for later judgment?”
“Not my call. I’m only the pilot.” As he touched the instruments the canopy went transparent. They were dropping into a mountain valley. Eron had no time to see anything before they were taxiing inside a hangar.
“If I refused to take the vow, they wouldn’t take me as a student!”
“Probably not.”
“I could pretend.”
“You don’t have to pretend. A vow is always subject to revision by later judgment—assuming that you haven’t, by then, become a rule-slave.”
The canopy sprang open and Rigone was standing there on the black-and-yellow striped expanse of floor, his tattooed face grinning up at them. He had a hand for the boy as he dropped to the plasteel.
“Where is this place?” asked Eron, looking around at the modest hangar, trying to see where they had come from before the high doors rolled fully shut
“Not for you to know,” commented Murek as they led him into a side corridor of levitating verticules. He grinned. “A necessary secret.” The three rose on a platform, then were escorted to the hidden operating room where they were stripped and passed through a nonopening clean-door where almost alive clean-suits enveloped their bodies. The theater was illuminated in an eerie red light, presumably to protect some components from the energy of higher wavelengths.
Eron was offered a seat, his head reexposed, and his fam gently removed, sans comforting words, as if he went fam-less regularly, while Rigone donned huge goggles. Surgeon machines wired Eron’s head to some sort of feedback net with other instruments in the room. Murek seemed to be there only as a guide to watch over his now-incompetent pupil. With perceptions unfiltered by his fam, Eron noticed the ascendancy of his senses—as during his escapade with Nemia. This time he was calm, with no rush of erotically driven feelings. The lines of the machines seemed too sharp, the colors too reddishly electric, the precision motors that grasped and moved his strangely remote fam, too precise, the instrument readouts at the comer of his eyes fraught with mysterious meaning whose function he did not have the mind to question.
Rigone worked at his station, standing, seemingly forever. Sometimes his hands were busy. Sometimes he passively watched the machines that were active under his command. Eron endured his wait stoically, the torture being the passage of time. His mind remained eerily at peace.
Finally Rigone lifted his goggles and grinned. “That was easy. Now for the hard part. Hang onto your pants, boy! And don’t piss.” He replaced the troll’s goggles and went back to work without a pause. Eron wanted to get up to look; but he was restrained.
“Let him work,” Murek advised. An hour went by. Eron dreamed animal thoughts while wide awake, knowing that his fantasies made no sense, fascinated by a dreamlike illogic that, famless, he couldn’t analyze.
When they reattached his fam, he was floated to an elegant recovery room, chandeliers, entertainment console, beds and soft bedspreads, fine active murals with motion subdued to the pace of expected contemplation—but Eron wasn’t in a mood to notice; he was frantically testing for his new powers and finding them absent. He was asking himself outstanding questions and not getting answers! It was horrible. The operation had been a failure!
Rigone seemed placid. Murek played with the room’s cuisinator until he came up with a syrupy alcoholic drink for himself, which he began to quaff in large gulps. That wasn’t like Murek at all. He was turning into such a strange man right before Eron’s eyes; the calculated restraint that Eron was so used to seemed to be disappearing for hours at a time, as if some wildman had taken possession of his tutor’s body. Maybe his vision was just the strain of the operation.